Latest Articles

​According to Jonathan Grix and Fiona Carmichael, when implementing national sport policies, one of the governments' main objectives is to invest funds into gaining international prestige. Although these national sport policies' objectives have also been identified by several other leading scholars in sport governance, research proposing a measurement of these policies' success or failure remains scarce. In fact, to evaluate if countries have reached international prestige through sports, researchers tend to generally refer to the Olympic Medal Table, while the newly created soft power indicators, the "Soft Power 30", "Soft Power Index" and "Global Soft Power Index" have not managed to use appropriate sport rankings to measure countries' capacities to use sport as an instrument of soft power. The objective of this paper is to identify the inaccuracies of these commonly used indices and propose a new ranking that would evaluate whether the national sport policies implemented by governments have succeeded in developing soft power.